RasPi IoT Development Kit: ThingBox

"Use Internet Of Things technologies on a Raspberry-Pi without technical knowledge"

Data Dial

ThingBox, from the folks at FunDaTrix (itself the consumer-oriented arm of French software company Digital Airways), is a free and open-source project designed to let casual coders easily create programs for the Internet of Things. All you need is a Raspberry Pi and a little bit of technical know-how (but much, much less than a professional developer).

“The Thingbox provides a ready-to-use, ‘all in one’ IoT software package that can be used by non-developers,” explained Digital Airways co-founder Nicolas Silberzahn in an email to Postscapes.

The software includes the MQTT protocol for letting devices talk to one another and an HTTP server platform built on Node.js -- though the target user shouldn’t need to know much, if anything, about that. The bundle can just be easily installed to the Raspberry Pi to make it ready for IoT programming thanks to Node-RED, a drag-and-drop visual programming interface developed by IBM Emerging Technology group (@knolleary, @ceejay) that runs in a web browser.

"Now, working with Things is for anybody,” Silberzahn wrote -- but it’s maybe not quite that simple. The software packaged with ThingBox takes care of the low-level stuff that lets the Raspberry Pi connect to other devices and to the Internet, and Node-RED does simplify the coding process. However, you’ll still need to muck about with a fair bit of Javascript to actually create the IoT app of your dreams. Luckily, the ThingBox project includes documentation and example code for a bunch of simple projects to get you started.

Silberzahn told us ThingBox is still a work in progress, and future versions will improve ease of use, offer additional features and services, and make it easy to link ThingBox with mobile apps. To learn more about the project and find download links, visit TheThingBox.io.